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<h1>The Japanese Writing System</h1>

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<p align="right"><i>Japanese (n): The devil's own tongue designed <br /> to thwart the spread of Christianity</i></p>

<h2>The Alphabets</h2>
Japanese consists of two alphabets (or kana) called <i>hiragana</i> and <i>katakana</i>, which are two versions of the same set of sounds in the language.
Hiragana and katakana consist of a little less than 50 "letters", which are actually simplified Chinese characters adopted to form a phonetic alphabet.

<p>Chinese characters, called <i>kanji</i> in Japanese, are also heavily used in the Japanese writing.
Most of the words in the Japanese written language are written in kanji (nouns, verbs, adjectives).  There exists over 40,000 kanji where about
2,000 represent over 95% of characters actually used in written text.  There are no spaces in Japanese so kanji is necessary in distinguishing
between separate words within a sentence.
Kanji is also useful for discriminating between homophones, which occurs quite often given the limited
number of distinct sounds in Japanese.</p>

<p>Hiragana is used mainly for grammatical purposes.  We will see this as we learn about particles.  Words with extremely difficult or rare kanji,
colloquial expressions, and onomatopoeias are also written in hiragana.  It's also often used for beginning
Japanese students and children in place of kanji they don't know. </p>

<p>While katakana represents the same sounds as
hiragana, it is mainly used to represent newer words imported from western countries (since there are no kanji associated with words based on the
roman alphabet). The next three sections will cover hiragana, katakana, and kanji.</p>

<h2>Intonation</h2>
As you will find out in the next section, every character in hiragana (and the katakana equivalent) corresponds to a [vowel] or [consonant + vowel]
syllable sound with the single exception of the 「ん」 and 「ン」 character (more on this later).  This system of letter for each syllable sound makes
pronunciation absolutely clear with no ambiguities.  However, the simplicity of this system does not mean that pronunciation in Japanese is simple.
In fact, the rigid structure of the fixed syllable sound in Japanese creates the problem of intonation in place of the difficulties that exist in separate
consonant and vowel alphabets such as the English alphabet.

<p>Intonation of high and low pitches is a crucial aspect of the spoken language.  For example, homophones can have different pitches of low and
high resulting in a slightly differently sounding of the word even if it is written with the same sounds.  The largest barrier to proper and natural sounding speech
is incorrect intonation.  Many students often speak without paying attention to the correct enunciation of pitches making speech sound unnatural
(the classic foreigner's accent).  It is not practical to memorize or attempt to logically create rules for pitches, especially since it can change depending on the context
or the dialect. The only practical approach is to get the general sense of pitches by mimicking native Japanese speakers with careful listening
and practice.
</p>

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<div class="outtitle">Lessons covered in this section</div>
<ul>
<li><a href="hiragana.html">Hiragana</a> - The main Japanese phonetic alphabet.  It is used mostly for grammatical purposes.  It can also be used
to show the reading for rare or obsolete kanji or as a substitute altogether.  This lesson will go over all the letters in hiragana.</li>
<li><a href="katakana.html">Katakana</a> - An alphabet used generally to distinguish non-native words that does not have any kanji
associated with it.  This lesson will go over all the letters in katakana.</li>
<li><a href="kanji.html">Kanji</a> - An adoption of the Chinese writing system for Japanese.  This lesson describes some general properties of
kanji as well as some strategies for learning kanji (correctly).</li>
</ul>
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<p class="copyright">Copyright &copy; 2003-2007 Tae Kim (taekim.japanese AT gmail.com)</p>
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<div class="small" style="text-align:right;"><pre>This page has last been revised on 2004/11/24</pre></div>

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